Linux 4.7 Brings A Plethora Of New Features: AMD Polaris, ARM ASpeed, SGI UV4, Schedutil
Other Hardware:
- Many network improvements and the fight is still on against bufferbloat.
- New ASUS and Corsair HID device support including Corsair's K70R, K95RGB, M65RGB, K70RGB, and K65RGB mice and keyboards.
- Light Ridge Thunderbolt controller support. Light Ridge copper controller was used in many Apple products circa 2011 and 2012 while now it's finally seeing proper mainline kernel support.
- New Realtek chip support, more Skylake HDMI audio work, and other new audio hardware support.
- The Microsoft Xbox One Elite Controller is now supported by the mainline Linux kernel after Valve was carrying patches in SteamOS the months prior.
Other:
- There's now mainlined a EFI bootloader control driver and additional core EFI capsule update work.
- An atomic interface for PWM.
- The LoadPin security feature, which was ported from Chrome OS and is a Linux Security Module to restrict where any kernel modules/firmwares can be loaded.
- The usual churn within the Linux kernel's staging area.
- The CONFIG_TRIM_UNUSED_KSYMS option as a way to remove exported kernel symbols that go unused. This can help security and compile size (especially if LTO'ing your kernel).
- Chrome OS keyboard backlight LED control support for Chromebooks.
As usual, stay tuned to Phoronix for benchmarks of the new Linux 4.7 kernel features as well as on LinuxBenchmarking.com and OpenBenchmarking.org.
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